Western Digital announces plan to acquire SanDisk

Yesterday, Western Digital announced plans to acquire SanDisk Corporation, a company that specializes in memory chips and SD cards. According to a statement released on Wednesday, Western Digital will purchase all of SanDisk’s shares in a deal totaling about $19 billion; a combination of both cash and stock will be paid.

Western Digital's CEO Stephen D. Milligan will serve as chief executive of the combined company, while SanDisk's President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra will join WD's board of directors. As is common, this planned acquisition must have both regulatory and shareholder approval, and likely won’t close until Q3 2016 as a result. Toshiba's joint venture with SanDisk will be ongoing.

Said Mehrotra in a statement, 'Joining forces with Western Digital will enable the combined company to offer the broadest portfolio of industry-leading, innovative storage solutions to customers across a wide range of markets and applications.' One of those markets is certainly photography. What are you thoughts on the acquisition? Let us know in the comments.

Comments

From all the storage brands I tried, these two are the most reliable products. They work as advertised and never let me down, unlike Samsung, Transcend and Kingston, each of whom made me scream at least once! I hope the joint company will get even better.

Sandisk and Samsung are actual flash memory manufacturerswhile e.g. Kingston is just rebranded memory from different manufacturers of different quality depending on the batch and actual manufacturer whos remaining stock they are buying

Mehrotra is as useless as the MS CEO. He reduced the company to nothing sourcing everything to india even though it was not cost effective ( had kick backs from TATA.) I know this as an insider who witnessed more than my share of dirty business practices. He lined his pocked many times over and will continue to as his worthless body sits on the WD board. What a joke. And as was mentioned earlier in comments - no there will be no more EE of Sandisk for R and D or any other function- sad, really. Another one bites the dust.

Sandisk is a great company but lost direction/motivation in the last 5 years. Not updating their MP3 player line which was very popular, releasing so-so media readers, Sandisk has been a company which has just cruised along with only predictable memory media products.

Judging a company exclusively by a how well it behaves with a Microsoft product really isn't a wise decision. Never embrace the latest OS by MS. I have W7 and it's been working like a charm. Why? Because it takes many years for an OS to become reliable. All you're doing is playing catch-up when you continually upgrade to the latest OS.

What exactly were you looking for in W10 that you couldn't get in W7, I have to ask. Other than the "FREE CLICK HERE NOW!" message from MS.

It will be business as usual but WD needs the flash manufacturing capability of Sandisk to remain relevant in the future as hard disks are on their way out on many applications, becoming a niche in a few years.

They're quite late though, probably waiting for Sandisk's price to come down, as Samsung is at least 1.5 years ahead versus all flash storage makers.

Since there has been no news of this from Sandisk I am guessing this is a predatory takeover.

Since Sandisk seems like a perfectly viable company I would see this as a bad thing specially for all the employees at Sandisk who will became "redundant".

Sandisk actually has manufacturing capability (rare for a brand name these days) so I guess it could be a win win if WD injects some cash for R+D and upgrading so that Sandisk can remain competitive. Will this happen though?

Currently Sandisk seems to always get beat out on price by Adata, in Canada at least. And I have found products from both reliable. I have SSDs and microSD cards from both.

Smart move on WDs part, my feeling is spinning disk is on the way out. Especially for anything consumer oriented like portable hard drives. An SSD is a fraction the size as a portable HDD, but more importantly they are 3 or 4 times as fast for both reads and writes and much less likely to suffer damage if they are dropped. What does Seagate have up their sleeve? Hopefully something...

Convergence playing out. Spinning disks are losing share to SSD in the commercial markets, just starting to play out for consumers. If you're a leader in spinning disk, you've got to do something to get ahead of that.

Remember when the high capacity CF cards used in cameras had spinning disks? I kept one, probably should donate to a museum.

Pretty indifferent towards this myself... My last couple SD cards were Lexar/Micron, Sony, or even Transcend. My last couple PC drives were all Samsung SSD. SanDisk makes decent cards, SSD, and NAND of course, WD still makes decent HDD that we'll need for a long time (if not at home for backups then in data centers); this easily makes them the biggest supplier capable of serving both mediums.

No prob. After trying different brands i settled on Sandisk only for all my flashcards. First CF, now only MicroSD. Never ever had an issue with them, much less any data loss.

After trying different brands i settled on WD and IBM/Hitachi for all HDDs i bought. Never had any issue with them, neither in desktops/workstations nor motebooks nor NAS/Raid systems (but the Raid controller once broke, leaving the entire array useless, luckily had a full backup, no data lost).

Today and going forward I only buy solid state memory (SSDs). Currently Samsung is my vendor of choice. Also no issues whatsoever up to now.

If Sandisk shareholders want to cash in, and WD shareholders believe, it's worth buying, then good for them.

If future products are good, reliable and cost-efficient, i'll keep buying. If not, then not. As simple as that.

Make your own judgement rather than anecdotal posts on forums. Keep in mind too, that there are basically 2 HD manufacturers today - everyone else is a subsidiary - including HGST, who makes the most reliabel drives per Backblaze. Guess who owns them?

WD is no worse than any other spinning disk company, and the entire reliability issue is the spinning disk part. I imagine nothing will change with SD other than where the money goes. If anything they could use the memory from SD to make WD SSD drives, so probably nothing changes in terms of SD.

It might be important to distinguish internal from external drives. Western Digital bare drives seem to have a much better reputation for reliability than the enclosures WD puts them in.

My experience is consistent with the Backblaze study. I bought a couple of the infamous run of flawed Seagates a few years ago, they threw up errors, wouldn't even format properly. Soured me on the brand.

The Western Digitals my family has owned have been flawless so far, internal and external, 2.5" and 3.5".

My judgement is from [my] experience, not anecdotal. Every single WD drive I have ever owned has had problems of one kind or another. In all honesty the most reliable have been the RED drives I run on my Synology DiskStation. So far so good.

And the software is simply atrocious on anything but the bare drives. I had a SAN from them that they themselves said could not be fixed. I ended up not taking the 3rd replacement and switched to Synology. More expensive, but better software.

How can I ignore my reality? It is you who are ignorant of it. Living by statistics is missing out on actual quantification. If you can show me the statistics you refer to, maybe you can gain back some credibility. So far your statistical analysis is based on what? 50 people here out of a million or so who own products?

I usually buy what is on sale from ibm, hitchi, wd, seagate and maxtor, samsung over the years. 1 ibm failed and 2 western digital hhds. I adviod wd hhd as much as i can now with hitchai or seagate as the perfer hhd. Hope they dont cut corners on scandisk product. Overall the solid state hdd and sd card i dont have much issues with.

OMG I hope not. My many SanDisk drives (physical and SSD) have always been as near 100% reliable as possible. My WD drives are mostly in the pre-smash-to-pieces state, because they KEEP failing, but I DARE NOT bin them - because someone, somewhere, can probably access my (broken) data.

I take my failed HDDs apart (most need a star drive screwdriver). The discs inside can be used as mirrors or art, etc or can be destroyed without too much trouble. However, I am really after the magnets inside, as they are very powerful (although unidirectional). Anyway, I use them around the house, such as putting them in my pants pocket so that I can hold tools on the outside of my pants pocket when, say, working up on a ladder. Great for holding screws, nails, etc, also. Just don't put a memory card anywhere near them!

If you use software called Killdisk to zero your disks' data, put a hammer through them a few times to make sure, then a few bullets from the gun you are bound to have for good measure, then not even God could extract data from your disks.

Now, that's an interesting one. But there are perils...for Sandisk, as we know it (not for its shareholders). The other way around: those WD HDDs (REALLY) refuse to die...5 - 6 years up and running already. Incredible.

Obviously, drives that spin are being replaced by drives that don't. But judging by the prices of SSD, there's not much money in WD's new business. There still seems to be good markup in CF cards but how many are sold and how long will CF be around?

WD seems to be after sandisk's SSD business. In two years, we will have 15TB+ SSD and physical drives dont seem to be keeping up. WD spinning disks have a death date all over it just like DSLRs....its just a matter of time. Next up, maybe Nikon will buy samsungs camera business.

I agree about ssds vs hdds, but dslrs vs mirrorless is not the same. Light from a mirror is faster than any electronic viewfinder could hope to be; at best you won't notice a difference, but it cannot be faster, and it's unlikely to be clearer or nicer to look at in typical shooting conditions. It might be cheaper, but that's another argument entirely.

That is a valid point about optical viewfinders compared to electronic but I could also point out how an EVF could effectively give you night vision depending on sensor performance. Also, most people care about size and with a VF. you are not limited by the size of the mirror/sensor.I would love a medium format size VF on a full frame camera, how about you?The lag and dynamic range is an issue. Lag could easily be overcome by good timing on the photographers end.

Both of these companies specialize in products that require a lot of R&D, very expensive R&D, if they are to be successful. Sometimes, those R&D expenses can be more than one company can handle alone.

You may have seen the news recently that the CEO of Fiat-Chrysler wants to "merge" his company with GM. That's because autos, like electronics, require huge amounts of investment just to stay current or ahead of the competition.

And, as the blind radio station operator said in, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou", "...we got to beat that competition..."

There are statistics on HDDs published by Backblaze. While WD hard drives are not reliable as Hitachi (HGST now), they are much better than Seagate. Basically, if WD survived for the first 3 months, then it will last a long time.

Spinning rust is inherently unreliable. Most HDDs die after a couple of years. Many die a long time before that. Some are defective straight out of the box. As it happens my most recent DOA was a WD.

So far the only one I haven't lost any of are Samsung HDDs. Three drives bought, three still work. (I did have to say that..? Why did I have to say that..?)

Hitachi/IBM/HGST have produced the drives that failed me the most. IBM/HGST were sufficiently bad that I lost several RAID5s, as the drives failed faster than I could RMA and replace and rebuild them... It was HGST's warranty process that guaranteed I'll never touch one of their drives again. Having to pay out of pocket to return failed drives to them, which they then only sent a replacement for on receipt. The replacements were usually drives that other people had already RMAd (based on the data fragments on the ones that showed any signs of life), assuming the replacement drives span at all - several didn't even spin.

Actually, most acquiring companies tend to pay too much for new acquisitions, relative to future value. They are difficult to work sometimes, regarding operational cultures of two different businesses etc. The target company's shareholders usually do well in the short term.

I would say as an outsider this merger makes sense, not just for people to make money but also for human civilisation, for society at large.

You can own stock too, you know. Just like you can get involved in politics. That's the beauty of benign, non-autocratic civilisation, and the efficiency of capitalism.

Latest in-depth reviews

The Fujifilm X-H1 is a top-of-the-range 24MP mirrorless camera with in-body stabilization and the company's most advanced array of video capabilities. We've tested the X-T2's big brother extensively to see how it performs.

Panasonic's Lumix DC-GX9 is a rangefinder-style mirrorless camera that offers quite a few upgrades over its predecessor, with a lower price tag to boot. We've spent the weekend with the GX9 and have plenty of thoughts to share, along with an initial set of sample photos.

Panasonic's new premium compact boasts a 24-360mm equiv. F3.3-6.4 zoom lens, making it the longest reaching 1"-type pocket camera on the market. We spent a little time with it; read our first impressions.

Latest buying guides

Quick. Unpredictable. Unwilling to sit still. Kids really are the ultimate test for a camera's autofocus system. We've compiled a short list of what we think are the best options for parents trying to keep up with young kids, and narrowed it down to one best all-rounder.

Landscape photography isn't as simple as just showing up in front of a beautiful view and taking a couple of pictures. Landscape shooters have a unique set of needs and requirements for their gear, and we've selected some of our favorites in this buying guide.

If you're a serious enthusiast or working pro, the very best digital cameras on the market will cost you at least $2000. That's a lot of money, but generally speaking these cameras offer the highest resolution, the best build quality and the most advanced video specs out there, as well as fast burst rates and top-notch autofocus.

Are you a speed freak? Hungry to photograph anything that goes zoom? Or perhaps you just want to get Sports Illustrated level shots of your child's soccer game. Keep reading to find out which cameras we think are best for sports and action shooting.

At this year's CP+ show in Yokohama, we sat down with senior executives from several major manufacturers, including Canon. Topics of conversation included Canon's ambitions for high-end mirrorless cameras, and the importance of responding to the demands of the smartphone generation.

We were recently able to follow local frame builder Max Kullaway as he created one of his AirLandSea bikes. Here are our picks of the photos we got, as the project progressed from bare tubes all the way to rideable bicycle.

On paper, the Sony a7 III is a tempting option for photographers who've been considering a switch to full-frame mirrorless. But how does its image quality stack up? We compare it to the Mark II and a few of its other peers.

Google Lens uses artificial intelligence and 'computer vision' to identify and provide information about businesses, landmarks and other objects using your phone's camera. And now it's available for iPhone users, too.

In the job posting, the Times' describes this role as "one of the most important and high-profile jobs in visual journalism." If you're looking for a high profile job in photojournalism, you could do a lot worse than being Photo Director at The Gray Lady.

According to a recent report out of South Korea, Samsung is increasing production of its ISOCELL image sensors in a bid towards market leadership for image sensors. To reach this goal, Samsung will have to dethrone current market leader Sony... no small task.

In this video, large format photographer Ben Horne shows off the incredible resolving power of 8x10 slide film by pixel peeping a massive 709.6-megapixel drum scan of one of his landscape shots. And you thought 100MP medium format was big...

Photographer Wendy Teal tells the heart-breaking story of a wedding she shot at a hospital on just 24-hours notice. The mother of the bride had been given one week to live, and Wendy responded to the couple's desperate social media plea for someone to capture their special day.

Syrp has announced the Magic Carpet Pro: a slider that offers filmmakers an 'infinitely extendable' range thanks to built-in track levers that let you connect lengths of track without the use of tools.

At CP+ we sat down with executives from several major manufacturers. Among them was Kenji Tanaka, of Sony, who talked to us about the a7 III as well as its plans to attract more pro shooters – without ignoring APS-C and entry-level customers.

How do you shoot macro photography on an 18x24cm large format wet plate camera? You 'connect' two large format cameras together! That's how wet plate photographer Markus Hofstaetter did it, and you can read about the whole process in this article.

The Fujifilm X-H1 is a top-of-the-range 24MP mirrorless camera with in-body stabilization and the company's most advanced array of video capabilities. We've tested the X-T2's big brother extensively to see how it performs.

Motorsports photojournalist Jamey Price recently flew to Canada with Lamborghini for the car company's Winter Accademia 2018, where clients get to drive the latest Lamborghini supercars on snow and ice. Yes... it is exactly as awesome as it sounds.

For the Pixel 2 smartphone's Motion Photos feature, Google built on its existing Motion Stills technology by adding advanced stabilization that combines software and hardware capabilities to optimize trimming and stabilization.

"After his camera was stolen from his room in the orphanage, he switched to an iPhone for his photography, reasoning that the image quality of a big, heavy camera was less important than the freedom of a cell phone. 'Quality? Screw it, I’d sketch things with a pencil if I could draw,' he wrote in a blog post."

Chinese manufacturer Vivo has announced some AI-powered Super HDR tech to compete with Google's HDR+ system. Both systems combine multiple images to create a final shot with more dynamic range and less noise, but Super HDR claims to do so more intelligently.

The 'semantic image segmentation model' categorizes every pixel in an image and assigns it a label, such as “road”, “sky”, “person” or “dog.” And now, Google has released its latest version as open source, making it available to any developers whose apps could benefit from the tech.

Fuji's latest firmware update for the GFX 50S adds two new features: a focus stacking mode, and a 35mm format mode that takes 30.5MP photos using the center portion of the camera's medium format sensor.

The crash has raised serious questions about 'startling safety gaps' in the doors-off photo tour industry. After a brief safety video, passengers are strapped in with heavy-duty harnesses and given only a knife to cut themselves loose in case of emergency.

For the first time in five years, Adobe is raising the price of some Creative Cloud subscription packages. The good news for photographers: The $10/month CC Photography plan that includes Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, and Lightroom Classic CC will stay the same.